"Dead on," Sheila said. "Dead for sure, if he'd talked. Washington was after the Company for the make and the Company was stonewalling like hell, lay you odds on that—and I'll bet there's a plane seat for Ross tonight on a Guiana flight. What's it take? An hour down there? Half an hour more, if a shuttle's ready to roll, and Ross would have been no-return for this jurisdiction. That's all they needed." She flipped the com back to On again, to the city's ordinary litany of petty crime and larcenies, beneath an uneasy sky. "This is 34, coming on-line, marker 15 on the pike, good evening, HQ. This is a transmission check, think we've got it fixed now, 10-4?" 2002

THE SANDMAN, THE TINMAN, AND THE BETTYB

CRAZYCHARLIE: Got your message, Unicorn. Meet for lunch?

DUTCHMAN: Charlie, what year?

CRAZYCHARLIE: Not you, Dutchman. Talking to the pretty lady.

T_REX: Unicorn's not a lady.

CRAZYCHARLIE: Shut up. Pay no attention to them, Unicorn. They're all jealous. T_REX: Unicorn's not answering. Must be alseep.

CRAZYCHARLIE: Beauty sleep.

UNICORN: Just watching you guys. Having lunch.

LOVER18: What's for lunch, pretty baby?

UNICORN: Chocolate. Loads of chocolate.

T_REX: Don't do that to us. You haven't got chocolate.

UNICORN: I'm eating it now. Dark chocolate. Mmmm.

T_REX: Cruel.

CRAZYCHARLIE: Told you she'd show for lunch. Fudge icing, Unicorn. . . CRAZYCHARLIE: . . . With ice cream.

DUTCHMAN: I remember ice cream.

T_REX: Chocolate ice cream.

FROGPRINCE: Stuff like they've got on B-dock. There's this little shop. . . T_REX: With poofy white stuff.

DUTCHMAN: Strawberry ice cream.

FROGPRINCE: . . . that serves five different flavors.

CRAZYCHARLIE: Unicorn in chocolate syrup.

UNICORN: You wish.

HAWK29: With poofy white stuff.

UNICORN: Shut up, you guys.

LOVER18: Yeah, shut up, you guys. Unicorn and I are going to go off somewhere. CRAZYCHARLIE: In a thousand years, guy.

Ping. Ping-ping. Ping.

Sandwich was done. Sandman snagged it out of the cooker, everted the bag, and put it in for a clean. Tuna san and a coffee fizz, ersatz. He couldn't afford the true stuff, which, by the time the freight ran clear out here, ran a guy clean out of profit—which Sandman still hoped to make but it wasn't the be-all and end-all. Being out here was.

He had a name. It was on the records of his little two-man op, which was down to one, since Alfie'd had enough and gone in for food. Which was the first time little BettyBhad ever made a profit. No mining. Just running the buoy. Took a damn long time running in, a damn long time running out, alternate with Penny-Girl. Which was how the unmanned buoys that told everybody in the solar system where they were kept themselves going. Dozens of buoys, dozens of little tenders making lonely runs out and back, endless cycle. The buoy was a robot. For all practical purposes BettyB's sights, he'd always swear he was going to stay, and by the time six months rolled around and he'd seen every vid and drunk himself stupid and broke, hell, he was ready to go back to the solitude and the quiet.

was a robot, too, but the tenders needed a human eye, a human brain, and Sandman was that. Half a year running out and back, half a year in the robot-tended, drop-a-credit pleasures of Beta Station, half the guys promising themselves they'd quit the job in a couple more runs, occasionally somebody doing the deed and going in. But most didn't. Most grew old doing it. Sandman wasn't old yet, but he wasn't young. He'd done all there was to do at Beta, and did his favorites and didn't think about going in permanently, because when he was going in and had Beta in

He was up on three months now, two days out from Buoy 17, and the sound of a human voice—his own—had gotten odder and more welcome to him. He'd memorized all the verses to Matty Grovesand sang them to himself at odd moments. He was working on St. Mark and the complete works of Jeffrey Farnol. He'd downloaded Tennyson and Kipling and decided to learn French on the return trip—not that any of the Outsiders ever did a damn thing with what they learned and he didn't know why French and not Italian, except he thought his last name, Ives, was French, and that was reason enough in a spacescape void of reasons and a spacetime hours remote from actual civilization.

He settled in with his sandwich and his coffee fizz and watched the screen go. He lurked, today. He usually lurked. The cyber-voices came and went. He hadn't heard a thing from BigAl or Tinman, who'd been in the local neighborhood the last several years. He'd asked around, but nobody knew, and nobody'd seen them at Beta. Which was depressing. He supposed BigAl might have gone off to another route. He'd been a hauler, and sometimes they got switched without notice, but there'd been nothing on the boards. Tinman might've changed handles. He was a spooky sort, and some guys did, or had three or four. He wasn't sure Tinman was sane—some weren't, that plied the system fringes. And some ran afoul of the law, and weren't anxious to be tracked. Debts, maybe. You could get new ID on Beta, if you knew where to look, and the old hands knew better than the young ones, who sometimes fell into bodacious difficulties. Station hounds had broken up a big ring a few months back, forging bank creds as well as ID—just never trust an operation without bald old guys in it, that was what Sandman said, and the Lenny Wick ring hadn't, just all young blood and big promises. Which meant coffee fizz was now pricey and scarce, since the Lenny Wick bunch had padded the imports and siphoned off the credits, which was how they got caught. Sandman took personal exception to that situation: anything that got between an Outsider and his caffeine ought to get the long, cold walk in the big dark, so far as that went. So Lenny Wick hadn't got a bit of sympathy, but meanwhile Sandman wasn't too surprised if a few handles out in the deep dark changed for good and all.

Nasty trick, though, if Tinman was Unicorn. No notion why anybody ever assumed Unicorn was a she. They just always had.

FROGPRINCE: So what are you doing today, Sandman? I see you. . . Sandman ate a bite of sandwich. Input:

SANDMAN: Just thinking about Tinman. Miss him.

FROGPRINCE: . . . lurking out there.

SANDMAN: Wonder if he got hot ID. If he's lurking, he can leave me word. T_REX: Haven't heard, Sandman, sorry.

UNICORN: Won't I do, Sandman?

SANDMAN: Sorry, Unicorn. Your voice is too high.

UNICORN: You female, Sandman?

T_REX: LMAO.

FROGPRINCE: LL&L.

SANDMAN: No.

DUTCHMAN: Sandman is a guy.

UNICORN: You don't like women, Sandman?

T_REX: Shut up, Unicorn.

SANDMAN: Going back to my sandwich now.

UNICORN: What are you having, Sandman?

SANDMAN: Steak and eggs with coffee. Byebye.

He ate his tuna san and lurked, sipped the over-budget coffee fizz. They were mostly young. Well, FrogPrince wasn't. But mostly young and on the hots for money. They were all going to get rich out here at the far side of the useful planets and go back to the easy life at Pell. The cyberchat mostly bored him, obsessive food and sex. Occasionally he and FrogPrince got on and talked mechanics or, well-coded, what the news was out of Beta, what miners had made a find, what contracts were going ahead or falling through.

Tame, nowadays. Way tame. Unicorn played her games. Dutchman laid his big plans on the stock market. They were all going to eat steak and eggs every meal, in the fanciest restaurant on Pell.